10 All Time Best Basecamp Alternatives for Project Management

No matter how much responsible you are about your work, you are bound to forget tasks at times. It becomes tedious at times to manage tasks of a whole team; monitoring each one’s task and also having a clear view as to how much progress has happened in work. In such situations, team management apps come as a savior. You sure must have heard of Basecamp as a project management tool, but today I am going to discuss some exclusive Basecamp alternative.

App stores are flooded with apps that help in managing your team seamlessly.

But are all these apps worth trying?

How do you know which one will save your time and energy?

Basecamp and Basecamp Alternative

I faced the same situation some 10 months back. As our number of projects and customers increased, it became more difficult for me to manage tasks. Unknowingly time was wasted, the work speed lagged and I found it difficult to keep a track of who is doing what. Not just me, but our whole team seemed to be oblivious of what the other person is doing. So, we decided its time we start using team management apps. Since, the app market is already overflowing with team managing apps, we decided to start with Basecamp.

Basecamp Alternative for Project Management

On right time 37Signals understood the need of web designer/agencies and came up with Basecamp– a clean, simple and elegant way of managing projects and collaborating with clients. I personally loved Basecamp.

Frankly, $20 or so every month did not seem much compared to the services I was using. I liked the fact that Basecamp did not try to do everything. Rather it did one thing and was perfect. But in two months’ time, I started looking for basecamp alternatives. As our projects and customers increased, I found Basecamp less useful. The one problem was, 37Signals did not try to improve Basecamp. Rather, additional services like Campfire and Highrise came into the market from them. Some other pressing issues with Basecamp were-

For using the chat feature, I was asked to sign up for Campfire.

Time tracking was missing – this feature can be availed by third party integration.

Sad that even the “New” Basecamp came with no trace of time tracking feature claiming that no one was using it. Well, we were and we loved it!

Basecamp refused to grow, but my team was! I needed better options and the best basecamp alternatives now.

Best Basecamp Alternatives that I tried:

While building a team during the last 10 months’ time, I tried many team management apps. Here I will discuss picking up the best basecamp alternatives, along with their pros and cons. I tried to find the best option, but honestly, nothing is perfect. I realized every app has its strength and weakness. So, instead of searching for the perfect solution, I turned my focus on what problems I was facing with Basecamp. I started to look out for apps that will help me solve these problems first.

Basecamp Alternative – Team Work

Basecamp Alternative-Team Work

Next, I tried Teamwork. Why I tried teamwork? I was browsing through reviews of different project management apps when I chanced upon Topten REVIEWS. There I saw Teamwork has received a verdict of 7.88 out of 10. I scrolled down the list of features and reviews featured against each. Hence, I decided to try Teamwork. The first thing I noticed in Teamwork is an entire page dedicated to a detailed comparison with Basecamp. Among its 100,000 companies mentioned like Pepsi, Forbes and EA. Here are some of the features to love about Teamwork PM:

Sophisticated search – Enables you to search any term quite easily.

Continuously updates iOS and Android apps – These apps are loaded with the latest features.

Time tracking feature even available on the mobile app.

Milestone Tracking – Enables to break large tasks into small achievements.

Integration with 3rd Party Apps, like, Google Calendar, even Gmail and other Google Apps.

The best part about Teamwork Project Management tool is that it readily available Zapier integration, which opens up the wide integration of advanced web applications.

Although Teamwork’s free plans allow unlimited users, it allows just two projects and 10 MB storage. To upgrade, you need to have a paid plan at $12 per month. With that, you get just 5 projects and 1GB storage. To avail unlimited projects, the price goes up to $149 per month and at this price, you get 80GB storage. Another disadvantage of Teamwork is features are price-restrictive, especially those in regards to integration with storage apps like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Update: Teamwork products are prepared with GDPR requirements to serve the European customers and subscribers accordingly. With the third-party vendors audit, data access, portability, and privacy policy, Teamwork has updated all the detail here.

Basecamp Alternative – Hive

Hive is one more Basecamp alternative which you should try-out for your team in your company. Hive application has plenty of features starting from planning a project to executing them with team-mates, maintaining regular communication and monitoring the progress along the timeline.

Having a flexible project management system, with multiple view and actionable templates, you can quickly plan the repetitive tasks. Using action cards, action lists and forms you can execute the project plans with great pace, these help you save time while switching back-and-forth the email mailboxes. You can also share the forms outside your organization, among clients, customers and more.

Built-in communication integrations with Slack and Zoom helps you instantly organize video conference and internal messaging. File sharing with the team, partners invite for collaboration in a single project are some of the collaboration features that keeps Hive head on head with Basecamp and other alternatives.

Update: Hive products are fully compliant with GDPR, and it has taken all the significant steps to serve the EU citizens and subscribers. Data controllers belonging to EU can enter into a new revised DPA(data protection addendum) with Hive. Also, Hive is self-certified under EU-US privacy shield which further makes the data transfer more protected.

Apps and Integrations:Hive instantly integrates with more than 1000+ tools, and also have integration available with Zapier, Dropbox, and more tools. You can immediately import existing tasks from other alternative systems like Asana, Trello, Basecamp systems – Incase you are looking for instant migration.

For a remote working team, Hive also has apps available for iOs and Android mobile phones, along with Windows and Mac operating systems.

Hive vs. Basecamp:

While compared with Basecamp, Hive has Kanban Board, Gantt Chart, single dashboard view combining all projects, request forms and time tracking.

Hive Price Plans:Hive price plans are pretty straight-forward, coming in 2 packages, Professional and Enterprise, the Professional plan is available at $12 per user per month, and for Enterprise plan you need to talk to their sales team. Unfortunately, there is no annual plan available, but to cheer-up, you have 14 days free trial available.

Basecamp Alternative – Wrike

Basecamp Alternative-Wrike

At one of the point of time, I also tried Wrike. The fact that Paypal, Adobe, HTC, Disney and Nissan use this, I thought to give it a try, check the features, that our team might need. From Wrike, I liked the fact that resources and deadlines are moved centrally which helps teams to align fast.

Features of Wrike are worth mentioning here are:

Elegant and simple to understand interface

Detailed time-tracking feature

Integration with Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, as well as mobile apps

Provide Free up to 5 users and with 2GB storage.

Wrike has all useful carts including, Gantt Chart, Baseline Chart and Performance Chart which shows and tracks all progress and achievements according to the plan. With great collaboration with all the team members, Wrike also includes real-time document editing, where you everyone can collaborate at the single sheet, similar to Google Docs. Another, very different offer from Wrike, came in form of exclusive case studies, learning resources and industry performance benchmarks. All these helped us in gaining more knowledge about our industry.

Wrike is a great project management tool for:

Marketing Teams

Creative Teams

Project Management Teams

Product Development Teams in a company across the Globe.

Not only this, if your company uses Google Apps then, Wrike has very close integration with them, you get to:

Easily attach documents straight from Google Drive

Save time with Gmail gadget inside your Gmail account

Integrate tasks into your Google calendar

Now only these, looking at overall feature integration of Wrike with Google Apps, we can call it Google Project Management Tool.

The pricing model of Wrike: The Paid version of Wrike starts at $49 per month for 5 GB storage and unlimited projects. Upto 5 users, you can try free plan of Wrike.

Wrike update:

To be able to put up with new GDPR law Wrike is continually investing in new tools and features to make their product GDPR compliant. These updates include improving the security infrastructure, an audit of the third party contractual terms and conditions, new tools for data portability and data management.

Basecamp Alternative – Asana

Basecamp Alternative-Asana

I had heard a lot about Asana . So, I decided to try it. Asana is a wonderful Basecamp alternative and a great team management app. It allowed me to add more than one person to a task, track what others are doing, mark a task finished and also create different teams as per my need.

Features I loved about Asana:

User-friendly interface, easy to understand

Integration with Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, GitHub, WordPress and many more – these are all the apps we use day and night.

Perfect for Small and Mid-size businesses; especially for growing startup like us.

Mobile and tablet compatible – One of the most required features for flexible team.

Asana offers open source Chrome extension and its REST API can manage users, projects, tasks, workplaces and stories! This Task Management software serves companies like Twitter, Uber, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Rdio, NationBuilder, and Airbnb. Rosenstein from Hops & Hominy compares the working of Asana to a healthy human brain. He opines Asana is the future where coordinating collective actions will be hassle free for every organization on earth. To Rosenstein, Asana has its heart in helping people self-actualize, help their fellow men and leverage their potential.

Asana was great until the trial period expired. The paid version seemed costly for us, since all these features I was getting by paying at Asana, I could avail them for free at Podio. Also, you can find my Wrike vs Asana review and Asana alternatives.

Asana update: Asana has introduced several new features to make their products GDPR ready. It includes everything ranging from data transfers, security, data management, and other portability tools. You can find everything related to that here.

Basecamp Alternative – Podio

Basecamp Alternative-Podio

After a few days I started with Podio. Found in 2009 and acquired by Citrix 2012, Podio is definitely a fresh take on team collaboration. I will give a quick overview of Podio’s features-

I immediately took a liking to Podio. Any app that connects me to Evernote and Freshbooks, is always welcome. So, Podio was my next trial. Although Asana promised “Teamwork with emails”, I still took a liking to Podio for its integration feature, especially its integration with Campaign Monitor, Dropbox, and Google Docs. The icing on the cake was our custom integration with Mailchimp alternative – Mailerlite.

Podio also has a freemium model. However, I would say this is where Asana out beats Podio. Podio offers free version for limited access rights and functionality control to up to 5 users. After that, it is $9 per employee, per month. Asana definitely wins.

Comparison with Basecamp:

In the hunt for a perfect tool for project management, I started with Basecamp, followed by using other tools over time; one by one. Here is a very first comparison of Basecamp vs Asana:

Basecamp VS Asana

Basecamp cost varies on the basis of projects and storage. For instance, at $20/month, 10 active projects and 3GB space can be used. Asana, on the other hand, can be called a basecamp alternative free app. Most small businesses can do with the free version. For those who cannot, unlimited projects at $50 is more than reasonable!

Basecamp provides unlimited projects at $150/month worth 100 GB. If you require more, you need to buy the complete package of 500GB space and a priority support at $3000 straight! Asana has a different take on storage. A company spokesperson quoted “Asana doesn’t specialize in storage functionality, so instead offers integrations with cloud providers Dropbox, Google Drive, and Box. For individual files uploaded to Asana, there’s a 100MB limit per individual attachment”.

Basecamp has a ‘master’ calendar for the whole team. Also, you can have specific project calendars. Asana hosts the option of having personal calendars as well as project-specific calendars.

Next comparison I want to do with Basecamp vs Podio:

Podio provides a review of all the tasks across the workplace, unlike Basecamp which reveals the ‘To-do’ lists only. In Basecamp you will need to navigate across all the Accounts to know the status of your task.

In basecamp ‘Discussions’ pick up from where To-dos take leave, but sadly these are separate features. Podio has the Task comment threads and descriptions features in contrast to Basecamp.

Basecamp definitely has its priority set to clients engaging priority; and it is perfect. Podio has a weird way of showing the “contacts”. They have something called “External Users” which are supposed to be either contacts, or clients! It is confusing, in other words.

However much we negate emails, it ultimately boils down to one truth- emails are important. Your clients may have different systems to worry about. In such cases, emails are saviours. Basecamp does this most effectively and beautifully. The email notifications for project activities are a seamless way to have control. Podio is a mixed bag in this case. There are a lot of features that keep users wondering what’s happening. The lack of integration of emails for actual conversations is where Podio lags.

After Podio, lets compare Basecamp vs Teamwork:

Basecamp VS Team Work

Well, Teamwork went on to have a detailed overview of how it has all the features that are missing in Basecamp. Starting with Time tracking, recurring tasks, assigning multiple people to one task, advanced privacy options- Teamwork kind of built itself keeping Basecamp in mind I think! To add to that, they also list down reviews from ex-Basecamp users who now use TeamworkPM. Seems like Teamwork took the Basecamp vs Teamwork bit too seriously!!

More Basecamp Alternatives that I used:

Basecamp Alternative-Bitrix24

Bitrix24: Bitrix24 is a social Intranet for your business. It is a task management app, integrated with document sharing and time-tracking with social network apps. What it offers include blogs, calendars, files, tasks, photos, workgroups, likes, task comments, and more! It advocates a freemium model. Get the free version here. You can also avail the Enterprise Version of Bitrix24.

Basecamp Alternative-Zoho

Zoho Projects: Break down your complex tasks into simple milestones and task lists with Zoho Projects. Features that Zoho offers makes it a strong Basecamp alternative software with time tracking. Names like Techcrunch, PC World, New York Times features in their customers’ list. Its integration with Google Apps, Dropbox and Github, along with new mobile apps makes Zoho Projects a simple Basecamp alternative.

Basecamp Alternative- Atlassian Jira

Atlassian Jira: Atlassian Jira, another Basecamp alternative, has more than 23,000 customers and an user-base of 30,000,000. LinkedIn and NASA are some of the prominent names among others who use Atlassian Jira. It includes Google Apps integration, time management, and tracking features, and also has a HTML5 enabled mobile interface. Jira also has self hosted option for a one time price of $10 for 10 users, $1,200 for 25 users and so on. If you are to use Jira on an open source project, Atlassian will let you use it for FREE.

Basecamp Alternative- Freedcamp

Freedcamp: Freedcamp is an open source Basecamp alternative. It is most explicitly cited as “the closest free alternative you will ever get to Basecamp”. With 140,000 customers at bay, Freedcamp by Enavu has Google, ABC and Chase Bank in the list. The simple interface, social media integration, browser alerts and other communication tools make Freedcamp one of the best Basecamp alternative software. It is free for unlimited users, but it comes with only 20MB storage. You can upgrade it to 1GB at $2.49/mo. Unlimited storage is available at $39.99/mo.

While I think the above eight options are the closest competitors to Basecamp, two more I think is worth mentioning as Basecamp alternatives are Trello and Glip.

Mostly all of them are mobile compatible and have social media integrations. Basecamp is good in the initial stage, but sadly Basecamp stood rooted to its original features, with no improvisation at all.

Yes Kane. I recall, while I was trying out Wrike, with few people in team, they were very quick to understand the whole concept behind Project Management. And for Marketing team it turned out to be the best tool.

Another great project management tool I would like to add is Brightpod (www.brightpod.com). It takes the entire campaign planning & collaboration process online so you don’t miss anything. Do give it a try.

We used Basecamp for a while but then we left it because it was really to simple, in particular we needed a powerful editable Gantt chars and some cost management. In the end we found Twproject that is really easy to use but at the same time full-featured. I suggest it to everyone http://twproject.com

TeamWave has no integration to Office 365, therefore no way to see events in Outlook calendar, get reminders about events and so forth. Same with contacts. I don’t like Bitrix24 tech support which is non-existent but they can integrate with O365.

I agree with Ankit’s summary that there’s no silver bullet application out there so I think your starting point needs to be what are your current pain points and which tool can best alleviate them.

For most teams of a medium size I’d say you can break down their basic needs into the following areas:

1) Project Task Lists ——————————————– These are the quickest and easiest way to define the tasks needed to get a project done.

2) Project Tracker (Gantt) ——————————————– Helps to estimate timelines at the outset and keep a track on overall progress.

3) Schedule (Task Calendar) ——————————————– A way for project and team managers to see who is doing what and when. This view should allow you to see the bottlenecks where you’ve got too much work on. For individuals this view should give them a detailed view of what they’ve got on that week.

4) Time Tracking ——————————————– Without time tracking your ability to track progress on projects will be extremely limited. Also your ability to bill for work done will be finger in the air stuff.

5) Simplicity ——————————————— Many of the more powerful tools out there – e.g. Wrike and Mavenlink – for me fall into the trap of over-complexity and tend to overlook some of the basics that the like of Basecamp do so well.

So when assessing Project Management tools I would use these as your base level requirements and anything else is a bonus.

Now, here comes the good news. I’ve spent the last four years using project management tools and being frustrated in one area or another so decided to setup my own company and build a tool that does cover the 5 key points above.

Just found this article on Twitter as we are currently searching for a project management tool. We are testing several tools, and so far I can recommend http://www.stackfield.com! It’s really easy to use and offers features like group chats, tasks, file management and a calendar for each project!

Great article. It is really interesting to see what other people are using, For couple of months I have been using Basecamp Alternatives which is Asana, reason why I drop basecamp is that Basecamp is not a genuine venture administration application yet rather more like a To-do rundown or errand administration item.

It depends on what you are looking for, there are many good Basecamp Alternatives listed here already. However, if you are using Basecamp tool for product management, you may want to check out Asana as my company have been using this without any issues!

How are Basecamp and its alternatives helpful for your business? Basecamp and its alternatives like Asansa, Podio, Teamwork etc help you to efficiently manage your business processes. These management apps help you to build a proper plan for your projects thereby giving you an opportunity to effectively utilize time and resources.

However, after two years of use, I realized that Trello does not match completely. It had its flaws and I decided to start a startup and make a tool for collaboration as I see it. Two months ago, I wrote documentation, describing the features outlined in UX to programmer – developer less wandering. We did, and two working meetings to discuss about everything.

It is perfectly human instinct to start looking for an alternative, but it is all the more true in the field of technology. Similar is the case with Basecamp, I have myself got frustrated with it regarding different issues, one of them being tracking of time against estimate.

I liked Basecamp in general, but the price for several projects seems to high for me. Right now I’m trying out a new piece of PM software, deskun (https://deskun.com/). I like it so far, it quite easy to use and provides the features I’m looking for (multiple projects, delegation and low price). Have you heard anything on it, Ankit?

Hi Ankit! I’m even more confused, to be honest. You said Asana’s freemium model is great but once its over we can switch to Podio but then you suggest Asana better again in comparison with it.Too many contradictions in your comparison of asana and Podio. How would you sum it up?

I have been using Asana for quite a long time and for me it is the best in terms of functionality and usability. It provides Google drive integration which is very useful and is free for a team of 15 people. This makes it quite a good pick for startups who are just beginning with their venture.

Arc 9 is a great alternative to base camp as it combines all the features of traditional tools like dropbox, vimeo and even basecamp. You can use it for videos, images and everything else without any hassle. It also allows you to invite clients to view your work and give feedback in any form whether visual or textual.

The basecamp for me is super easy to use. You need not be tech savvy in order to use and setup Basecamp. The only problem that I find is no integration with Dropbox or Google drive thus you need to upload the files manually.

Nice Information. Very well explained. Using a project management tool could really help in managing Projects, team and time! It indeed is very important to choose the right tool. I use proofhub for managing my projects and tracking time. It’s a great management tool. I’d recommend you to try it too!

Wrike has enhanced their mobile app capabilities that I really liked. The users can now see the stream of ongoing tasks in their inbox, get redirected to the specific task by tapping on the push notification and view their work in offline mode. Wrike updated their calendar and added several features with it. Do you know how it is different from their previous version and how it can help to improvise my team efficiency? Can you please provide a quick overview of the Wrike smart calendar to let me better understand its benefits.

Being a top-notch project management tool, ProofHub is a great Basecamp alternative that is helping professionals to eliminate various project management woes. It acts as one place for your projects and team communications. It is an all-in-one project management software for your growing business needs.